MAGFest Laboratories was this past weekend. (Full disclosure, I do know several of the bands that played and hosted the Opposing Bloodlines competition panel) Taking the place of MAGFest Classic from the two years prior, the event still retained the same amount of lower-key atmosphere and less of the grandiose of main MAGFest. The concerts, however, were still plentiful in both number and variety.
If you happened to be wary of the new branding of the mini-MAGFest event and missed out, you’re in luck! The crew running MAG Labs were zippy as ever in making sure all of the concert performances were up on their Youtube channel in HD quality within hours of recording, so you can already watch the entire musical entertainment from the event.
Kudos to the MAG Labs music and media departments for their timeliness, and for making sure that those who missed the event can still get in on the awesome. (And that those who did and have any of the dreaded post-MAG depression can receive a nice emotional boost.)
Did you attend MAGFest Laboratories? What did you think of the performances? Let us know what you thought in the comments!
Ulysses 31 was a cartoon before my time. It aired in 1981 and combined space adventure with Ancient Greek Myth in the 31st Century. Most importantly though, it had an incredible soundtrack composed by Haim Saban, Shuki Levy, Denny Crockett and Ike Egan. The latest edition of the soundtrack is an incredible accomplishment. The producers located all of the original recording masters and had them mastered at Abbey Road Studios, London. Even cooler is the album has it’s own trailer.
The series was a huge hit in France, and the album opens with the French theme song. However at 119 tracks spread across two CDs, all of the English songs have been included as well. If you’re a fan of 80’s cartoon music this is must own. You can read the full track details on the video game music database, or in French at the producer’s website.
You can order the album directly from Amazon France for 25 Euro plus shipping.
Were you a fan of Ulysses 31 when it aired in North America?
It’s not often that soundtrack fans get something like the Sword Art Online Music Collection. The fact alone that it exists is something I am very thankful for. With the popularity of online streaming nowadays with sites like Crunchyroll and Netflix – we now have anime content available to us in record numbers. What I’m trying to say is that with this availability our need to purchase physical releases of the series themselves is decreasing.
However when it comes to getting our hands on the music for Sword Art Online in the past you had to buy it bundled with expensive import or domestic Blu-Ray sets. What you get in the Sword Art Online Music Collection is all of that exclusive musical content in one solid package. Read on to find out what I thought of this release, and my thoughts on the Blu-ray bonus disc included in the limited edition. (more…)
When the original Xbox launched with its 10 gigabyte hard drive, one of the uses Microsoft touted was custom soundtracks. I was immediately enamored with the idea after having shoved my own music into several PC games in the past. But what I imagined for the console was more daydream-y than the reality that the Xbox, and even the Xbox 360, delivered.
All I really wanted was options: the ability to tell a game, “these are the songs I want to hear during a fight and these are the songs I want to hear when I’m at a shop”. Sadly, this kind of musical customization is so rare that I completely forgot how much I wanted it until I picked up Double Damage’s Rebel Galaxy. It’s an extra surprising feature to find in a game whose most striking stylistic design is its soundtrack. The typical trappings of interstellar, sci-fi ship combat are set to a melange of grungy rock and blues tunes and peppered with gruff vocals and plenty of slide guitar. It adds a rough ‘n tumble, space cowboy feel to the game which has earned it loads of praise as “Firefly: The Game”.
As good as that music is, when I load the game up and see the option for “Custom Music” I simply can’t proceed until I try out something new. It’s not as boring as “here’s my music library, play something”, that’s the stuff Xbox consoles have been able to do for years. Instead, you can define the music used during combat, when docked at stations and when idly flying around the universe; you can even set the title screen music.
Appropriately, the first thing I did was set the Firefly theme for the title screen. Fitting. Mark Mancina’s score to SPEED worked well for combat and Ghost Monkey’s soundtrack to Zen Bound perfectly set the ambiance of space cruising. Simply slotting in albums doesn’t always make for a smooth fit as I’m sure you can imagine. So now I’ve moved on to compiling a collection of songs fit for Space Business and I’m getting close to spending more time curating than playing.
It’s a fun obsession, though, and one I’ve been waiting a long time to indulge in. Ironically, I may have curated a soundtrack that’s more typical of the genre but it’s only my first attempt. It’s full of bombastic orchestral battle themes and twinkly strings and percussion. You can check it out in action above. Like the urge to create that Super Mario Maker inspires, the ability to bring my own creative touches to this game has sent my imagination running. I’ve got all kinds of ideas for new soundtracks to play around with now. Even if it only amounts to a handful of unfinished playlists it’s been fun playing a sound designer of sorts for the last few weeks.
What about you? Have you ever injected your own music into a game? Built a custom soundtrack on a console or swapped out the music files in a PC game? Leave a comment and let us know.
The music software company Impact Soundworks has launched a second volume of their Acoustic Revolutions series titled Acoustic Revolutions 2. The library features loops of an acoustic Taylor guitar and are designed to be useful for a variety of styles and genres. The loops, which are organized by tempo, time signature, and key, do not require a sampler to be played and the WAV files can be dropped and placed into any DAW (Digital Audio Workstation).
Acoustic Revolutions 2 is available on Impact Soundworks for $49 and you can buy Acoustic Revolutions 1 + 2 as a bundle for $65. You can head over to the Impact Soundworks website for more details.
The organizers of the Music and Gaming Festival, better known as MAGFest, have begun announcing their guest list for next year’s event, set to take place on February 18-24 of 2016 in National Harbor, Maryland. The first guests being announced are none other than Golden Eye 64 and Banjo-Kazooie composer Grant Kirkhope and ReBoot creator Gavin Blair.
MAGFest will continue to reveal special guests and performers starting next week. A new batch of guests will be announced every Tuesday, and more MAGFest performers will be announced every Wednesday. To check out more info on tickets, hotels, guests, performers, and events for MAGFest 2016, be sure to head over to the MAGFest website.
It’s always interesting to hear a composer go outside of their established genre of music. This sometimes happens in order for a composer to flex their creative muscles, while other times it can be the result of pursuing a passion project. Ben Prunty is probably best known for his sci-fi genre music. In particular his work on the soundtracks for FTL, Gravity Ghost, and Star Crawler. While he has produced a few albums that aren’t related to games, they still maintained a similar tone and style to his game soundtrack work. So when I heard that one of Prunty’s latest solo projects was an experimental horror album, I had to take a listen.
The album, titled Dark Window, is an eleven track album that aims to capture the spirit of horror movies, urban legends, and just good old-fashioned ghost stories. Each track has a title meant to suggest the scene that the music is accompanying. Since this is at its core a concept album, this review will be focus on how well the tracks hit the mark for evoking an unsettling horror experience. (more…)
